The examination of the New York Times’ disgraceful editorial of October 26, “The Republican Party’s Supreme Court,” continues. The first section is here; Part I of “A False Narrative Exposed” is here.

“It was never about the supposed mistreatment that Robert Bork, a Reagan nominee, suffered at the hands of Senate Democrats in 1987. That nomination played out exactly as it should have. Senate Democrats gave Judge Bork a full hearing, during which millions of Americans got to experience firsthand his extremist views on the Constitution and federal law. He received an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor, where his nomination was defeated by Democrats and Republicans together. President Ronald Reagan came back with a more mainstream choice, Anthony Kennedy, and Democrats voted to confirm him nine months before the election. Compare that with Republicans’ 2016 blockade of Judge Merrick Garland, whom they refused even to consider, much less to vote on: One was an exercise in a divided but functioning government, the other an exercise in partisan brute force.”

Garland again! Returning to this anomalous and reckless gambit by McConnell signals that the Times has no genuine arguments other than rationalizations. The argument stated amounts to “they rejected our guy’s qualified judge, so we should have been able to reject their guy’s qualified justice!” (Pssst! Times editors! You’re supposed to be objective journalists. You’re not supposed to have a “guy.”)

But the worst is “supposed mistreatment.” Supposed? Here’s the infamous and slander suit-worthy attack on Bork by Senator Ted Kennedy:

“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”

No nominated judge had previously been subjected to insults in this manner, and no judge was after until the Democratics again stooped to such depths in their savaging of Brett Kavanaugh. Robert Bork was a conservative justice, but Justice Antonin Scalia was equally conservative if not more, and Bork was acknowledged to be brilliant by friend and foe. Bork was an intellectual, not an ideologue, and he believed in stare decisus, meaning that he was not a threat to vote to overturn established precedent, as Senator Kennedy, who might have been challenged to have graduate from a correspondence law school, implied. Had the tradition that existed before the Senate Democrats slimed Robert Bork not been obliterated, and the wise rule that if a President nominated a qualified judge for the Court, that judge was confirmed in a bipartisan vote, both Garland and Barrett would have glided through confirmations.

“How will a Justice Barrett rule? The mad dash of her confirmation process tells you all you need to know.”

This is called “not answering the question.” The Times doesn’t know; nobody knows. Trump’s previous two nominations to SCOTUS have surprised, so has Chief Justice Roberts; so have many previous Justices, like Souter, Blackmun, Powell, and others. Interestingly, it is almost always the conservative judges who show the ability to decide cases on their merits rather than knee-jerk ideology, angering the knee-jerk ideologues on the right.

“Republicans pretended that she was not the anti-abortion hard-liner they have all been pining for, but they betrayed themselves with the sheer aggressiveness of their drive to get her seated on the nation’s highest court. Even before Monday’s vote, Republican presidents had appointed 14 of the previous 18 justices. The court has had a majority of Republican-appointed justices for half a century. But it is now as conservative as it has been since the 1930s.”

Again, this is a flat-out misrepresentation. So far, the Roberts Court has not been extremely conservative in its rulings.

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